


wrecked

by forpeaches (bluecarrot)



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Shipwrecked, Blood and Injury, Canon Era, Everyone Needs A Hug, F/M, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, Isolation, Sex, eventually, everyone is angry and sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-15
Updated: 2020-03-18
Packaged: 2021-02-28 17:42:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,265
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23111143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluecarrot/pseuds/forpeaches
Summary: He’ll die otherwise, she told herself. He will die, and it’ll be my fault, and this might kill him anyway but he will die for certain if I don’t and so I have to try.*the j/b fandom deserves a good shipwrecked AU.this is not it.
Relationships: Jaime Lannister & Brienne of Tarth, Jaime Lannister/Brienne of Tarth
Comments: 27
Kudos: 121





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> written march, 2020.
> 
> the title is a pun!!

“Where is he?”  Brienne is yelling and she hates yelling but  she has to do it to be heard above the noise, it's wind and rain and waves of course, the storm howling in a mad song of its own, but it's more than that; men are yelling too, they're shouting orders back and forth. 

And some of them are just screaming. 

This must be what a battle sounds like, she thinks; this must be what _hell_ sounds like. The ship must seem like a toy on the ocean; the sails must look like rags, torn and fluttering. The men are scurrying like ants a nd she's barely holding to a rope, her tendons knotting up, all those years of aching muscles from swordplay finding a new use. 

The ship rights itself a moment and Brienne makes herself let go, makes herself stagger forward.  She can’t be selfish now. She promised she'd take care of Jaime, he is her responsibility and she doesn't know where he is.

She keeps calling for him, asking every face she sees. “Where is he? The Kingslayer — where is he -- where did they put him --" 

No one listens, maybe they don't even hear her. 

She’s yelling at a sailor to  _help her, godsdammit_ when a wave comes over the deck and sends her over the side.

*

Sunlight.

Grit in her mouth.

Brienne tries to sit up and is sick all over herself, mostly seawater and thick strings of bile. The world’s spinning a while, tipping up and back down before it settles.

Sand — she’s on sand — and her head aches and her body aches and that means she’s alive, strangely gloriously _alive_ —

Which means —

“Jaime?”

No one answers. Small wonder, she can barely do more than croak. I’ve been called a cow plenty of times but never a frog, she thinks: and then she’d laugh if she had the energy.

All around the beach are broken bits of things: snapped wood, tangled ropes,barrels and crates. 

Men. (Not men. Bodies.)

She makes herself go to the first one and turns it over with a foot and oh gods, if she weren’t already empty-bellied she’d be retching again, seeing him bloated and blue and grey, skin sloughing off. Eyes staring upward into nothing. 

She takes a steadying breath and makes herself look closer. 

It's not Jaime Lannister.

That doesn’t mean anything, though, it doesn’t break her of her vow to Catelyn. It only means this dead man isn’t the Kingslayer. She has to keep looking ... but t he next body isn’t him either, or the one after that. She gets into a rhythm with the searching, holding her breath and her heart and touching only with her foot, turning them over as quick as she can. Not him not him not him. 

The fourth body is on his side, he’s covering his face with an arm —

\-- and when she touches him, he screams.

Brienne screams, too. She falls back on her ass and scrambles away, back to her feet. “Kingslayer!”

He doesn't come towards her. He doesn't yell anymore, either. He's only moaning. So she goes towards him, careful careful she is weaponless and she must be _careful._ He's a danger. He's a dangerous man, Catelyn had said. I don't trust anyone else, Brienne.

Why isn't he coming after her? Why isn't he running away? He's only whimpering, curling up around himself and kicking his feet on the ground like he's injured, in terrible pain. And the sea-damp sand beneath him is all pink.

Maybe Brienne really is as stupid as she is ugly, because even staring at his stump, it takes her a moment to understand why.

*  
  


Necessities first. 

Water is first.

That’s easy enough: every few hours another storm comes through, and while rain water isn’t the _best_ solution it is the one she has right now, that means she can move on to the next issue and circle back when she has time. Alright. So. The next problem is to make fire. 

The problem is: Brienne can’t fucking remember what to do.

She should know how to do this — she  _does_ know, if she could only think. _Iron, flint ..._ alright. 

It takes most of an hour before the sparks caught and burned steadily enough that she was able to leave it alone.

The Kingslayer is asleep again, left arm pillowed below his head; his right is tucked against his waist, keeping it above the sand. Her tourniquet is still steady above his elbow. She'll have to take that off soon or he'll lose the entire arm. 

But the first thing is fire.

Brienne sits on the sand and tends it, hating herself, thinking  He’ll die otherwise, he will die and it’ll be my fault, and this might kill him anyway but he will die for certain if I don’t and I have to try, the Seven saved him for something and _I have to try._

He looks worn to shreds already. His eyes are huge, deepset over purple moons. 

He is going to die soon. He needs food and water, at the least. He needs a maester to take care of that hand.

So Brienne takes up a long piece of driftwood from the fire — left over from the wreck — and puts the fire against his stump. 

He only screams once before he passes out.

*   
  


She wakes from a dead, exhausted sleep to someone shouting in her ear, pressing down on her throat; it takes far too long to realize it is Lannister. 

“What did you do to me,” he's saying. “What did you _do?"_

She pushes him off. “I didn’t hurt you — I didn’t — leave me alone!" 

“You hurt me.”

“I didn’t. I didn’t. I wouldn’t. I found you. It was gone. It wasn’t me. I wouldn’t.  I _saved_ you.”

He stares at her. Something breaks in his expression and now he's crying openly. "You shouldn't have done it. I should have died. I should be dead."  He looks out at the ocean and she sees what he's thinking and he starts running but so does she and she moves faster than him; she  yanks on shoulder hard enough to send him toppling. 

He lands on his stump and that's the end of fighting. He  sobs, gasping and choking.

Brienne is tired and angry and frightened, and she wouldn't have hit Jaime on his wound but she's not going to regret that it happened, either. She leans over him, close so he can hear her over the pain. “Listen to me, you mouthy little shit. I was tasked with bringing you back to your family, and I am going to do it. You Are Not. Allowed. To. Die.”


	2. Chapter 2

Nothing hurts like that fire.

He dreams of water — of drowning — but all the while there is a screaming desperate pain he cant get away from and a woman’s voice whenever he tries. “No,” she tells him, “I won’t let you.” She forces mush down his throat and water too, she swears at him when he rests, she is worse than Cersei and his father and his fears combined, and he’s going to murder her with his bare hands, he thinks. Wrap them around her throat and strangle her.

Jaime knows his fever is gone when he sees the flaw in this brilliant plan.

*

Someone is praying.

_I’ll ask the Warrior to protect you_ Cersei has always told him: and Jaime believes it — that as much as she prays, it will be for him.

Her atheism doesn’t bother him any more than his own. Aren’t they the same, Cersei and he? Young, golden — perfectly formed —

Not now. He’ll never be perfect again.

Don’t think of her, then. Think of someone else. Think of Tyrion.

Jaime was in the sept — alone, and not praying — the last time he saw his brother. 

He’d gone in to light a candle and say the words to ask favor of the Mother; it was what he did, what he always did, since his own mother had died and he was knighted — they seemed to be the same act, one stroke of the knife, though a decade kept them apart.

_By the Mother, I charge you to defend ..._

He still didn’t believe, but he went to ask favor of whatever would hear. So.  He went and stood at her feet, trying to blank his mind. _Mother, I pray ..._

Jaime caught his breath. He never before counted himself a fanciful man, but he would swear that the statue had _looked_ at him just now ....

And so when Tyrion entered the nave, Jaime was on the dais. He held a candle in his right hand and raised it to her solemn stone face.

“You’re here,” said Tyrion. His voice echoed.

“We don’t march out til tomorrow,” said Jaime. He stepped back down and settled the candle in a niche, to shield it from drafts. “No need to fuss about farewells just yet.”

Tyrion’s face twisted. “Yes. We both know how Father dislikes a scene.”

Because it was true, Jaime said “Father dislikes everything”; because he loved his brother, he went obediently forward and knelt in front of the smaller man, embracing him hard.  “Be careful.”

“What is there to threaten me here? In the loving bosom of my family.”

“If I can help you—”

“If I have a problem that can wait the weeks it’ll take to hear your response,” said Tyrion, “I will certainly send you word.”

“Write me anyway. Problem or no.” Jaime stood up — it was time to leave here and past time. Cersei would be waiting.

He only glanced backwards at the last.

All the statues stood in their same places, of course, grim and placid stone; it was surely only the candlelight that made them seem to watch him, and to smile.

*

The woman isn’t praying to the Warrior, though that seems appropriate for Jaime, and probably none of the other gods would be any more likely to listen — so he is well and truly fucked.

But. No. She’s speaking to the Smith, calmly and confidently as one talks to a parent —

Not my parent, thinks Jaime. Not my father. Gods, this hurts, it hurts ...

“Mend him, help him find a whole pattern again—“

“He’s a smithy, not a weaver,” says Jaime

and the spell is broken: she’s staring at him, pale as anything.

And he knows her now.

Brienne of fucking Tarth.

*

His stump is ... alright. Disgusting, raw, painful and welted: yes. But it could be worse, far worse, and the fact is that he’s healing. 

He has no one to thank (or blame) for this except Brienne.

She’s embarrassingly competent. It’s annoying, really. She’s found a way to fold a broad flat leaf to act as a cup, a way that Jaime can do even with one hand; she has a low smouldering fire goingall the time, protecting it from the storms with more leaves. She’s got a pit dug for rainwater, a place to sleep, and stands half the day knee-deep in ocean, spearing fish.

Jaime hasn’t done much of anything. Oh, he went over the bodies to strip them of clothes and useful items, earning a grateful nod; he tends the fire and the water-pit and scrapes scales off the fish that Brienne brings him.

It isn’t enough. He’s angry, he’s tired, he’s —

“You’re healing,” says the wench.

“I should have died.”

She doesn’t answer this.

“I heard you,” he says. “Praying for me. Why did you choose the Smith? Why not the Warrior, the Father? The Mother?”

She takes another bite of her food (plain fish; what he would give for wine, butter, salt) and she doesn’t reply. Then she says: “I’ve always liked him best.”

“Seems like you’d identify with the Warrior.” He pauses. “Or the Maiden.”

“Yes, of course. But smithies ... they take things that are broken or can’t be used, and turn them into something else. I — I’m not much good as a lady, too tall and too ugly and too — too much. But maybe I can be useful in another way.”

She sounds so goddamn kind and thoughtful. Naive.

Jaime wants to smash it out of her. He says “So you went on your knees and offered yourself to Renly, and he wouldn’t take you—”

Her cheeks flush. 

“— then you went to Catelyn Stark. Said you could handle the Kingslayer. Is that it, wench?”

“Don’t call me that.”

“I’ll say what I like. Is that how it was?”

She sets her jaw. Doesn’t answer.

“Fine job you’ve done so far.” His voice drops low, dark and teasing, coloured with insinuation. “You could handle me better, maybe. Rub it slow.”

She flushes red and rises and stomps off, into — wherever.

Jaime smiles, mostly at himself. He really is feeling better.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> there is a scene in ASOIAF where Jaime dreams he’s in the sept; he meets and speaks to his mother, who calls him out on his bullshit.  
> i can’t write anything quite that heartbreaking.
> 
> *
> 
> Tyrion is as always modeled on my friend J, who is really not like him at all except that they’re both devastatingly brilliant.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They can’t seem to stop it.

The days pass, the weeks pass, they’re all alike. Sometimes it rains more and sometimes less. Sometimes they talk less and sometimes more. The sliver of moon swells to a round and disappears.

And the Kingslayer kisses her.

*

It isn’t like that — when it happens. Not like a story. They’re yelling at one another, he’s going off on her in a steady stream of curses, none of them particularly inventive, most of them calling her things she’s heard too often to be bothered by, anymore.  _Stupid ugly brutish cowfucker couldn’t even let me fucking die that fucking coward piece of_ , is the main point.

She loses her temper with him. It was inevitable, they’ve been on the edge for days, fighting to find a balance. And she’s always had a terrible temper.

He calls her a _mannish wench_ one more time, and  “Fuck you,” she snarls. She reaches out to thrash him and he catches her hand —

“Is _that_ it?” he says, spitting it. “Is this where we are?”

And they’re so close together, the tension is so hot and so close, she can’t help it: she kisses him.

The Kingslayer kisses her back.

They fall down on the sand and it isn’t quite wanting and it isn’t quite anger, but something of each. He has his hand in her trousers and he’s gripping her ass and swearing into her neck when she reaches down and finds what she wants.

He stops, temporarily on top. “Don’t fuck with me,” he says.

She pulls his hand around to the front of her body. “I’m not.”

He blinks, feeling her there. “You’re not, are you.” And he starts to explore — _is this good, wench? Or this?_ — but Brienne keeps her hand right where it is, right where she wants it, until.

*

It doesn’t feel shameful til it’s over: then Brienne finds her tunic and tugs it on. “I didn’t know people do that, in — in the light.”

If you shut your eyes,” says Jaime, “it’s dark.” Eyes shut, he says: “What do we do now?” 

Brienne closes her eyes. “I don’t know,” she says, in the darkness.

*

When she wakes up again it is different again. 

And there’s Jaime smiling at her, sleepy and sated and amused.

“You sleep too long,” she tells him.

“True enough. Although I think I can be forgiven for this one, since you exhausted me.”

She gets up. “There’s work to do.”

He studies her. “You’re not angry with me. You’re angry with yourself. For — what? Losing your maidenhead? Finding pleasure? What happened that was so terrible?”

She looks away. 

Water to the west; water to the east. Water to the north and south. And the two of them, stuck together in a little patch of green.

Brienne can’t seem to string two words together; she shakes her head. “You hate me. We hate each other —“

“No.”

“You _dislike_ me,” she insists. “You’ve told me so a dozen dozen times. More than that. I’m gangly and ugly and brutish, I’m too strong and my teeth are too large and—“

“None of that matters now.”

“Why? Because we’re alone? Because there’s no one else to fuck?”

“Yes!” he says: and looks ready to bite out his tongue. “No. Not for that — stop walking away from me, Brienne! Or fine, go on and keep walking if you like. It’s a bloody island, you’re not going to get anywhere.

”Of course I started — I wanted — because of _that_. But I want you because you’re strong and stubborn and you never, never give up, even when defeat is staring you in the face. I want you because you had a chance to let me die and you didn’t do it, simply because saving me was the right thing to do.”

She bites her mouth. “I saved you because it was my vow, to take you back ...”

“—Because it was _right_ , and you could do it.”

“I didn’t want to do it.”

“You did it anyway,” he says to her.

Brienne bites her mouth.

*

He falls asleep afterwards, sleeping more deeply than she’s seen him do it yet. 

The moon is up and full and his face is clear, the lines etched deep. He’s covered in beard now, too, and she doesn’t like to see him so — it makes him different, makes him foreign. Stupid to feel so, like hair and muscle make a man who he is: but feelings are inarguable.

There are so many things she doesn’t like.

He looks peaceful, here. It isn’t true.

Brienne closes her eyes and wills herself to sleep.  She doesn’t trust herself not to touch him.

*   
  


When she wakes up, he’s watching her.

Nothing soft and gentle, here; she’d been afraid of that, thinking that if they ever ... but his eyes are narrow, green ribbons in the early light; there’s nothing emotional here.

And he’s hard against her thigh.

So there is that, too.

Somewhere a bird sings. Nearby and hidden, she can hear the ocean.

He looks like he wants to kiss her — or fuck her — or fight her, maybe; maybe they’re all the same emotion for him.

Maybe they’re the same for Brienne. Because she wants him to apologize in some way for making her cry out last night. How dare he know how she sounds?

So she wriggles downwards, holding his gaze (he holds hers, only a little frown gathering together his eyebrows) until she licks her palm and takes him in her hand and lowers her mouth over him —

He shuts his eyes.

*

Madness. It is mad.

But so is the world, it seems, because they are alone and stranded and forgotten, sure to starve eventually. Neither one of them has spoken about it, just like she hasn’t mentioned the way Jaime’s — the Kingslayer’s — ribs push out of his skin, how the blades of his shoulders move like wings when he sighs, when he says her name. _Brienne_.

He puts his hand on her side where hunger has given her a waist, a feminine curve. The world is so generous.

Jaime swallows. “Brienne,” he says, the start of a thousand things he’s ready to speak

and a voice calls out: “Are you souls from some lost wreck?”

It’s a man — men — in a dinghy, pulling ashore. A ship in half-mast is on the horizon. 

“We’re en route to Kings Landing,” he says. “We’ll take you there. We saw the smoke of your fire, and thought to check.”

Jaime has hold of her hand, squeezing her fingers, but for once in his life she speaks quicker. “I am Brienne of Tarth,” she says. “And this is the Kingslayer — held prisoner on the _Direwolf_ by order of Lady Catelyn — I was charged to bring him to his family, and I mean to do so still.“

**Author's Note:**

> this is not _at all_ what i intended to write.


End file.
